Title: Villages in the city : analysis and proposal for a concious redevelopment : a case study of Lijiao
Abstract: INTRODUCTION
The Village in the City, as the name says, it is an autonomous settlement that, since the extensive development that affected Guangzhou, as well as other cities in China, has been dramatically swallowed by the dining mouth of the city just beside. Formerly surrounded by farmland, the farmers started losing it in spite of the urban space, still maintaining the property rights on their housing plot. Given their not alienable rights they cannot capitalize their assets into housing sale. Therefore their solution is to develop high densities neighbourhoods with high rising housing buildings.
The complex social, political and spatial issues, typical of the Chinese context, brought the emergence ViCs.
Ma and Wu (2005) pointed out that what seems to be an illegal settlement actually is not to be mistaken as a ghetto of despair where disadvantaged people are trapped hopelessly but are oasis of inexpensive housing and self-organized land transformations. The landlords earn a great deal of rent income and work hard to improve the villages quality.
When the city government confiscates the farmland, while leaving residential areas of villages, the latter demands a higher amount of compensation. Thus the Village in the City become recognizable by its dual urban- rural structure.
Deprived of their traditional agricultural resources, the villagers, out of need, become builders. The illegal buildings serve as housing for the masses of migrants, who are institutionally and economically excluded by the urban system. Consequently, ViCs become migrants enclaves, characterized by high density and overcrowding. Therefore, they work as twilight zones: the entrance to the city, the foothold for opportunities in development.
With the developments of urban areas and ViCs, migrants have massively floated to work in industries and service sectors into Guangzhou. Although, the majority of them cannot acquire the citizenship that links to formal urban housing, education, employment and social welfare. The city government recognizes them just as temporary workers and assumes that - theoretically - they will return to their home-towns in the future.
Unable to access public and commercial housing in state redistribution and formal market spheres, migrants turn to informal market options; therefore villagers who lost their farmland during the processes of urbanization and find difficulties to participate in the formal urban labour market, illegally build their houses to meet the cheap housing demand of migrants.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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